The Psychoanalysis of Myth and the Myth of Psychoanalysis
There is a very important myth that we have spoken of before, which is that the Shiva Lingam appears as a pillar of light—a pillar of infinite light—infinite in both directions, without beginning, without end.
And Shiva’s Lingam of light appears in the midst of a quarrel that is being had between Brahma and Vishnu, who are arguing about which of the two is the greater God, because Brahma is the creator, and Vishnu is only the sustainer. But if you can’t sustain a creation, what’s a creation good for? And then went back and forth like this for eons, until Shiva got a little bit tired of it, and so he appeared between them as this pillar of light—that was an uncanny experience for them both, and they heard a voice from the pillar saying “Can you measure this infinite light? Can you find its beginning? Can you find its crown?”
And of course Brahma and Vishnu said, “Of course we can do that, we’re the greatest gods!” And they said, “You go this way, I’ll go that way.” And Vishnu turned himself into a magic boar, and he bored into the earth and into the oceans, and he went down into the depths of the abyss. But he could not find the origin or the base of this pillar which just kept on going and going and going. And after a few million years of descending into the abyss, Vishnu’s energy finally gave out and he came back to the surface.
Brahma, on the other hand, flew up: turned himself into a magic swan and thought, “I’ll just fly myself to the top of this thing and perch there and declare myself the winner.” But of course he couldn’t reach it. But Brahma—who’s very clever but not very ethical—came back to the surface and told Vishnu “Yeah, I got to the top! I did it, it’s nothing.” But this didn’t make Shiva very happy, and he came out of the pillar and knocked off a few of Brahma’s heads until he came to his senses and recognized the supremacy of Shiva. And the legend is that the pillar of light descended into Arunachala and became the core of the power of Arunachala, so that anyone who would settle on the slopes of that holy mountain would receive the infinite, supreme, power of Shiva. And that wherever Arunachala was realized as the Self would be the real Arunachala.
But to analyze the myth as Brahma would do, we could say that the three gods represent the three registers of consciousness: that Vishnu is the imaginary, and Brahma the symbolic, and Shiva is the Real. And yes, while it’s true that you can imagine very beautiful heavens and very terrifying hells, and you can sustain those delusions for a pretty long time before they get boring and before they crash against the pillar of the Real—they will not ultimately sustain life. And yes, you can be like Brahma: you can be able to symbolically think about reality, you can conceptualize it to the point where you actually believe that you understand it and master it, and you sit on top of it—but somewhere inside you know you’re lying, and the head that is imagining its symbolic mastery is going to get blown off by the Real because there’s always a moment of reckoning, a moment of truth, when everything that isn’t real must collapse.
Jacques Lacan studied this matter, and his idea of what the Real is changed over the several decades that he worked on the problem. His first definition of the Real was that it was trauma: the Real is that which stops the imaginary ego in its tracks because something unspeakable happens, something that cuts its narrative, that makes it unable to go on in its illusory life, something that rips away the basis of its delusion and then traps it in that lost past, which paralyzes it and makes it unable to move forward in life; its capacity to proceed, to continue to develop and grow, is literally cut.
But in those early days of Lacan’s career, back in the fifties, he thought that you could use the symbolic to suture the trauma in the imaginary. And so all the psychoanalyst would have to do is create another narrative that could incorporate the old one in a slightly larger frame of reference, and the new frame of reference would enable the imaginary to continue. And it worked for a while, but it turned out that every frame of reference had a glitch—a point of failure—and another trauma would appear, and the guy who claimed to have been cured and left psychoanalysis was knocking on the analyst’s door six months later because his life still didn’t work. And then these analyses that were only supposed to last, originally Freud thought, just a few weeks—and then a few months, and then a few years—now they tend to average about twenty years, if not a whole lifetime! Most people’s final trauma is that their analyst dies while the analysis continues interminably. And eventually the analyst runs out of alternative frames of reference to offer the guy and says, “Why don’t you just become an analyst? That’s how I cured myself.” Their only medicine was the poison itself.
And so Lacan also realized the futility of what he was doing, and he couldn’t live with himself, but he couldn’t find a way, either, out of the trap because he was not able to enter the Real. And so what he finally said in the late seventies (he died in ’81)—he said, “The Real is the impossible.” You can never get Real because the ego isn’t real: the ego itself is the trauma that creates all other traumas—and it was created by a trauma and sustained through imaginary additional traumas. So there’s no way out, except as he finally attempted to help the client traverse the plane of the phantasm. And yet, what’s the phantasm? It’s not just the imaginary, but it’s the fantasy that you can symbolically think your way out of the fantasy of an illusory world—and he himself never traversed that plane. And his last words were that “My life has been a failure.”
And in his last days, and his last seminar, he stopped talking about psychoanalysis, and he gave a seminar on the Trinity, and he said, “Forget the symbolic father—we have to find the Real, and then you can become the Son, and you recognize the Holy Spirit.” And then he died, and the Lacanian disciples all said, “We can’t allow this seminar to get published.” And they censored it—still hasn’t been published. You can get a bootleg copy, it’s leaked out of the vaults below the Lacanian dungeons in Paris, but it’s still not an official part of the Lacanian canon.
His brother was a monk, you know? I believe a Cistercian. And, finally, he recognized his brother had been on a more accurate path than he had. But all of this to say that even his final idea of the Real was not yet Real, not Real enough, and we have to recognize the Real as being on a spectrum, just as that pillar is an infinite spectrum of consciousness. And ultimately it’s all Real, even the imaginary is Real, but it’s an emanation of the Real, as is the symbolic capacity to analyze. But where does it come from? And you cannot heal the Real 1 (as we call it here, the Real of trauma) without entering Real 2 (the Real of love). It’s only love that will heal the trauma of the ego’s illusory existence as a glitch in the order of the Real.